Hi it's Rudi from Better Music. I'm here today with the brand new Roland F-140R which has
just been released. It's a fantastic little piano, really good sounds, really good features.
It's predecessor the F-130 was one of the most popular pianos on the market for good
reason, had a lot of great features and was very easy to use and sounded great, so Roland
have taken it a little bit further, added some features, improved on things which I'll
go through in this video, so to start off with I'll show you some of the sounds and
show you some of the things that it does, but before I play, it has got an 88 note,
fully weighted PHA-4 action from Roland, so it's very natural, it's heavier at the bottom
than it is at the top, it's got a very good repetition rate.
It's easy to play, you can lay into it, you can play easy pieces, more advanced pieces,
it suits pretty much any type of player. So there's, overall there's about 316 sounds
on board including 11 grand piano sounds. The piano sounds use Roland's famous SuperNatural
sound technology, so the sounds aren't just a sampled sound, they're a mixture of sampling
and physical modelling, so it's very natural sound to play. So that was the piano you heard
in the intro, I'll play a little bit more for you.
So very sweet up the top...
So that's one of the piano sounds, the next one's a little bit different.
Little bit brighter.
So there's quite a few...
This one's got an electric piano mixed in it.
So we've got some strings mixed in the background...
So we've got a synth in the background...
Choir in the background on this one...
So that's just some of the piano sounds, there's quite a few, there's 11 different piano combinations
on board, on top of that there's 316 sounds so it can force all the general MIDI sounds,
so you can actually play MIDI files on this instrument, there's a USB port on the back,
which will play WAV file and also MIDI file, all the instrument sounds are hidden inside
so it will play full MIDI files including drums, bass and all those other instruments.
So this is just a few of the different sounds you've got on board, there's too many to go
through, but you've got electric piano.
So that's sort of like an old wurlitzer electric piano.
So that's an 80s electric piano. Here's more of sort of a Fender rhodes just from the 70s.
Again there's a lot of sounds on here, too many to show you but it's the kind of piano
that you can explore the simple functions 'cause there's not too many buttons on board,
they've kept it nice and simple to use, but you can get into it and there's a lot more
hidden inside. One of those things that is not immediately apparent is instead of just
having some sounds they've actually put a whole rhythm section in here as well so you've
got sort of some accompaniment features, there's 72 rhythms on board that you can play, so
I'm going to show you what that does, it works like an automatic keyboard, I can split the
keyboard, play a chord with the left hand and the instrument will generate a backing
for me, so I'm just going to put that on for you now...
So you can have a lot of fun, as I said theres 72 rhythms on there, you've got intros you've
got endings, you've got variations, so it gives you a little bit of extra fun when you
want to, you know your kids might have done their piano practice and want to have a little
bit of fun playing a pop tune, well they can, but again, going back to the normal piano
sound, you've got a -
- a full concert grand piano with really good touch, really good sound, in the price point
it's a pretty spectacular instrument, it just offers so much, which brings me to the next
thing, there's interaction with other devices. Roland have now been really proactive and
have actually included not only a USB port so you can play back MIDI files and WAV files
which I mentioned before, they've now added Bluetooth technology. This is a first on digital
pianos, and that enables you to connect iOS devices, both android and iOS, or any device
that you're going to use with an app, a music app, so I'm going to show you one of those
right now...
So this is an app called PiaScore which is available on the apple app store, so there's
a whole bunch of sheet music you can download, we've got a piece of music here, so you can
see we can scroll through the pages, now with the bluetooth function on the piano I can
actually assign one of the pedals on the piano to turn the pages for me via bluetooth, which
is fantastic, so it connects with the piano, this particular app has a whole bunch of features
where you can go and search for, if you'd like, if you're having trouble learning the
piece, you can actually search for a youtube clip within the app, it will find a youtube
clip of a performance of the piece that you can play along with, it's a very good app,
this is just one of the apps, there's countless apps available and because of the bluetooth
connectivity now, it's opening up a whole bunch of possibilities and Roland are right
at the forefront of the technology. If you've got Garage Band on your iPad, even better
again you can actually connect your iPad via bluetooth and use garageband on the app and
have the audio coming out of the iPad and coming back into the input on the piano, which
is fantastic. So again, new technology, it's just going to get better from here, and this
is a fantastic piano. So bluetooth technology is one of the things that they've improved
on these instruments, going back to the really popular F-130, so we've got bluetooth that's
been added to it, they've also changed a few other things for those of you that may have
looked at the 130 before, they've improved the speaker design, so it's a different speaker
they've put on it, it's actually a larger rounder 12cm speaker, so the bass response
is a deeper sound, it's also clearer, the sounds have been tailored and improved as
well, so all in all it's a fantastic package, they took something that was already very
very good and they've improved on it and made it better again, anyway, I'm going to have
a little bit of a play, I'll see you later!